Intermezzo: A Novel

4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars | 6,516 ratings

Price: 21.65

Last update: 12-23-2024


About this item

Long-listed, Washington Post Best Books of the Year, 2024

New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2024

Long-listed, Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2024

Long-listed, Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2024

Long-listed, Time Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2024

Long-listed, Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, 2024

Long-listed, NPR Best Book of the Year, 2024

"[B]rilliant narration by the actor Éanna Hardwicke"—Financial Times

"Éanna Hardwicke's narration highlights the rich emotionality of Rooney's newest novel. Hardwicke's smooth voice shifts to capture every mood—becoming desperately angry, bitter, and frantic yet also achingly tender, patient, and loving—as he performs a story of two grieving brothers."—AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner)

This program is read by actor Éanna Hardwicke, known for his role in Hulu's Normal People.

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.


Top reviews from the United States

  • YX Ou
    5.0 out of 5 stars Best book by Rooney so far
    Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2024
    What a book Sally Rooney wrote! Intermezzo is so incredible so heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. I even dream about the sentences in the book. I love all the characters she builds. You feel your heart is tightened and aching for all of them. The preciousness of love, tenderness, forgiveness. I simply can’t put the book down. But I don’t want to finish it too quickly. It’s just marvelous
  • B
    4.0 out of 5 stars A Contemporary Romance Novel
    Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2024
    Sally Rooney has done something remarkable in restoring a sense of high seriousness to the romance novel. Having read some of the commentary in the press, I was intrigued to learn, among other things, that the two central characters in the book were both male. Even highly accomplished novelists often have trouble showing the perspective of the other sex, and so I wondered how well she would succeed. A little bit to my surpise, she did it as well as any man, in ways almost a bit too well. The brothers Peter and Ivan are depicted intensely in all their psychological complexity. The three major female characters - Sylvia, Peter's wife; Naomi, Peter's girlfriend; Margaret, Ivan's older girlfriend - are also meant to be complex, but they seem more abstract and less vivid than the men. At the beginning of Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, the deluded Hoffmann says that his imagined girlfriend is three women in one: an innocent, a courtesan, and an artist. These are the three major male fantasies, at least in literature and the arts, since at least about the start of the nineteenth century. The lineaments of these, though adapted and a bit disguised, can be discerned respectively in Sylvia, Naomi, and Margaret. The prose of the novel is cryptic, fast moving. It is not only filled with astute psychological observations but also philosophic meditations on the nature of love, such as we find in classic authors such as William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. I became very caught up in the novel and expected to rate it a five (maybe even five plus), but I was very disappointed in the ending. Nothing is actually resolved, from the personal rivalries to the romantic uncertainties. That is not necessarily a flaw in itself, and it may be that these are unresolvable, in which case the novel could end on a tragic note. Instead, having vented their conflicts and resentments, all of the characters are reconciled without any resolution. This not only impresses me as unbelievable. It also senselessly dissipates the drama that Rooney has build up over the previous 400 or so pages. Love ceases to be an existential crisis and becomes a psychological problem to be solved by a therapist, a counselor, or an advice columnist.
  • eva
    5.0 out of 5 stars beautiful perspective on grief and human relationships
    Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2024
    Sally Rooney has done it again with breaking my heart and repairing it all the same.
    She keeps me hooked simply with the intricacies and beauty that is human relationships and the way grief twists them into something to be studied.
    These characters are strong and beautifully flawed. There are intricacies Rooney highlights, but also the simplicities that rudely stare us in the face. We miss those are gone. We miss our dog. We love someone. We want to kiss someone. All these things can have intricacies attached to them, but sometimes they can also be so simple and so human.
  • S. harris
    3.0 out of 5 stars The stream of consciousness style is tedious
    Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2024
    While I very much liked the idea of this story I was frustrated with Peter's stream of consciousness chapters. Been there, read Faulkner. Don’t really want to do it again. Otherwise, well written and thoughtful
  • MG in CA
    4.0 out of 5 stars Great relationship book; but unresolved and meandering character thoughts were annoying
    Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2024
    The character development was great- but the character thoughts came out as phrases and words sometimes (not sentences)- annoying. The brothers’ girlfriend situation remains unchanged at the end.
  • Steve Winnett
    5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Relational Novel
    Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2024
    In her 2022 T.S. Eliot lecture at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on the centenary of the publication of James Joyce's "Ulysses", Sally Rooney traced the origins of the novel in English back to women, not men, writing in the 18th century. This wonderfully erudite lecture published in the Paris Review is available online, and I recommend it to the attention of those who think Ms. Rooney is not a " serious" writer. She is indeed a serious writer, and "Intermezzo" is vivid proof of that. She said in an interview that she had learned much from the novels of Jane Austen and Henry James. That same moral seriousness is present in this book, which is a beautiful narrative of both internal thoughts and feelings and external actions and deeds, especially sexual deeds, in the interlinked lives of 2 brothers and 3 women in their lives. Sally Rooney used the term " relational novel" to describe books centered on the connections men and women sometimes succeed and sometimes fail to establish between each other. She then went on to show that "Ulysses" is such a relational novel. Her novel recalls not only Joyce but also Virginia Woolf. If you like the writers I have mentioned, you will love "Intermezzo".

    In a recent interview with the New York Times, Sally Rooney was asked about "big" issues like climate change and why she didn't focus on such topics rather than the relationships of Irish millenials in 21st century Dublin. (This is NOT an American novel please, and its characters and sensitivities are thoroughly Irish.) Ms. Rooney said that yes these larger issues are important, but that people had to live and needed a reason to live and their connections with other people on the micro not the macro scale provide them with hope and motivation to live. I love this book and I especially love the ending whose resolution of the storyline was as powerful and meaningful as the endings of Shakespeare's beautiful romantic comedies like "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The *end* of a story is the most important part. What a dreadful feeling when the author drops the ball at this crucial moment. Have no fear, gentle readers; when you reach the end of this wonderful book, you will be uplifted and you will feel that the hours spent on this reading journey have been well worth your valuable time.
  • Peggy Jo Donahue
    5.0 out of 5 stars Incredibly Moving; Incredibly Irish
    Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2024
    It’s hard to believe this book was written by a young person (I’m 69, so). Rooney’s sympathy, maturity, and depth of understanding about relationships is astonishing. She is a treasure, as a writer and storyteller. I’ve enjoyed all her books.

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